Macrium settings

Hi guys,

Apologies if this has already been discussed, but I think is worth it to have a dedicated thread anyway.
@Phoenix has sold me on Macrium Reflect. I wonder how people actually use it to backup their Notebooks.

My current setup:

• Macrium Reflect Free 6.3.1745
• Windows PE 10.0 menu recovery option (with bcdedit /timeout 0)
• USB Rescue Media
• Backup Definition: Windows Backup - All partitions
• Target: External HD plugged to my router (Not optimal, I'm willing to buy a NAS to speed up things)
• ImageID as File Name
• Schedule:
  • Full Backup once per month
  • Differential Backup every week
• Retention:
  • Keep 6 Full images
  • Keep 4 Differential Images
  • Purge oldest backup set(s) if less than 5GB on the target volume
• Advanced settings:
  • Compression Level: Medium
  • Intelligent Sector Copy
  • Verify Image or backup file directly after creation
  • Rapid Delta Restore: Disabled
  • SSD Trim: Enabled

Some questions:

1. Is my backup strategy enough or should I do daily backups? I use backups mainly to protect my system against destructive settings and disk failures. I'm already using OneDrive to backup my documents in the cloud.
2. Is Macrium Reflect 7 Home Edition worth it? Can you mention some features from the paid version that you are currently using (like Incremental backups)
3. Phoenix suggested that I could even disable System Restore. I understand that both Macrium and System Restore leverages VSS. Still, I've been saved more than once by automatic restore points before updates (or Restore Points created by Wise Care 365, between others). Do you trust your backup setup enough to disable System Restore?
4. Anyone using a NAS for backups? If so, care to share your hardware specs (including NAS box and Disks) and sequencial write speeds?
5. Any other hints?

 

4. I'd have to test the write speeds this evening, but I have a Synology DS1515+ with five WD Red 4TB disks. One raid volume spans four disks. The important data is also backed up to the fifth disk, and additionally an external USB drive I had laying around. This should help protect against unrecoverable RAID errors or issues with the Synology OS/firmware. Obviously if the house burns down I'm still up a creek.


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Hi Alex, That's a dream setup for home users. I'm definitely interested in your sequential write speeds. Maybe you could combine this with a tool that syncs your images to Amazon cold storage. Or maybe use something like Acronis.

Care to share your backup strategy / schedule.

 

Manually ran a differential, here's some unscientific data.
Transfer rate in the 150 - 500 Mb/s range, mostly about 380/400 or ~200 Mb/s, presumably due to file sizes.
This is going over WiGig to a wireless dock -> Ethernet to a switch on the 3rd floor media center -> Ethernet run to Netgear R7000 -> Comcast.

I run a full image monthly on a Weds. at 1 am (assuming machine is on of course, which it usually is).
Then a differential image weekly on Weds. at 3 am.
Full images retained for 10 weeks, differentials for a month.
Since December, backup usage is at ~630 GB, with about 7.5 TB unused in that volume.

 

Great stuff! Even with custom firmware my external HD plugged to the router can barely sustain 50 MB/s. Still, even a entry level NAS with 2 HDs in RAID 1 is quite an investment. Out of curiosity, are you running Plex or similar software in your NAS?

 

Yup I've been using plex (chrome app on PC, chromecast in living room). Any specific questions?

I went for the 1515+ partially because I wanted 4+ bays for some kind of RAID other than 0 or 1, partially for the CPU based on reviews saying it did well as a plex server, and partially because the RAM can be upgraded. It's not officially supported but passed memory tests and shows all 16 GB as available/usable.

It's definitely an investment, but I wanted to learn/experiment a bit for some work-relevant experience, and didn't want to find myself short on resources down the road.


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Brilliant setup. Is it working well for you? My use case would be basic; 4k streaming for the main TV and potentially streaming to 2 or 3 devices at once (HD quality). Do you think that the basic NAS - with no extra memory - can handle that well?

Right now Plex isn't working that great for me on the external driver. For instance, my music library takes forever to index and doesn't work that well (I'm actually not using it on a day to day basis anymore).

 

It works great for most things up to 1080p including transcoding on the fly - I don't have a 4K display to test higher resolution streaming with unfortunately.

What is plex currently installed on? Your router? It's definitely going to outperform that.


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Yeah, router with custom firmware. Definitely not a good idea. I'm between a Nvidia shield + external HD or a simple NAS.

Nvidia shield + 2TB HD is surprisingly close in price to a DS216se + two 2TB HDs in Raid 1.

Out of curiosity, can vou describe your current RAID setup in practice? (Raid level, how many disks are mirrored / striped and how many HDs can fail?).

Also, do you complement your local backups with cloud backup / syncing or do you feel safe enough with weekly image backups?

Kind regards (and sorry for the endless number of questions)

 

I have five 4TB disks. They're basically in Raid 5 I believe, but using the Synology SHR. The raid array has one disk redundancy, but only spans four disks. The fifth is just a normal file system.

Important data is backed up to the fifth disk, and cloned over esata to a 2 or 3 TB external drive. The goal here is two levels of redundancy to protect against raid corruption, dual disk failure (or a second disk failing during data recovery when replacing a failed disk - the recovery is hard on the drives so if more than one is close to failure the constant reads could push it over the edge). Smart tests are also run regularly to help predict disk failure so it can be proactively replaced.

No cloud backups yet - I'm not sure of many providers offering a few terabytes economically, and this way the data is restricted to equipment I own. If and when I decide I need that, something like Amazon glacier is one option. An alternative would be to set up a second NAS somewhere else and sync the two.

The simplest offsite backup would probably be rotating the external drive out monthly or so and storing a second disk at work or anywhere offsite.


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How, 6 HDs? That's a @Phoenix level setup (trying to push him into joining the conversation ). Really cool setup man.
While not as great as a full-fledged professional backup solution, if you have a trustworthy friend with some TBs of storage to spare (and a fast internet connection), it is possible to use software such as CrashPlan so that you can backup your stuff to a second location.

Are you using Synology Storage Manager or a third party software for SMART tests?

 

Alexhawker is on my ignore list

Here is what I do:

1) Install Windows
2) configure it to my liking but don't install any drivers or software yet
3) create the first base image using Macrium Reflect
4) Install all drivers + software
5) Create a 2nd image named ALL OK

For my backups, I back stuff to my external 6TB Buffalo HDD.

Now I'm not gonna copy/paste the entire contents everytime after they have been updated on my computer, so I use a program called SyncBack Pro and setup a backup task using mirroring mode, so whatever is on the source (my laptop SSDs) is replicated on the destination (the external HDD) but only the changes are copied. So if I delete a file from the source, it is also deleted from the destination and same goes for new files that I add.

This way, after the initial backup process, future backups take a matter of a few seconds only as only the changes are being made. I cannot live without this program. I have the Pro version but the SE version is just as good, the PRO just adds the ability to do FTP backups and whatnot

 

Yup, smart tests through DSM, scheduled tasks. I think quick smart tests weekly and full tests monthly- something like that, but I'd need to check the specifics. The only annoying thing is you can't schedule raid scrubbing tasks for some reason without custom scripts, not really sure why that would be.

Lol at Phoenix always commenting I never post anything useful to add to the conversation (which in itself adds nothing) and then ignoring me (so how the eff would he know...?).


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to be fair bro, this is the first time I see a useful post by you so props to you for that. Credit must be given where it's due. The only reason I saw your posts is this thread was full of messages from the OP only so I was like what's going on here is he talking to himself? Then I clicked the show ignored content and saw your useful messages

 

Whatever's the beef, sort it out. You are both cool cats. Ermm... Birds. I mean Starks... Ahem, hum... Bastards? Ok, you got the point.

Anyway, now I get why you strive to max out storage space.

Still, do you manually plug the external HD to your laptop before every "sync"? Or do you have some sort or laptop base / home server for that?

Finally, do you do any cloud backups? Or do you feel safe enough with images + mirroring to a single external HD?

Finally, what's your backup schedule? I'm very curious about what you do in terms of backup and restore after our chat about disabling system restore points the other day. I'm probably not brave enough to do that unless I'm running daily or continuous backup.

 

I just manually plug in the external HDD every 2-3 days sometimes even a week. You see, SSDs have never failed me and I am not that scared of any data loss like I was in the HDD days but I still backup just for that extra sense of security

I use OneDrive as my cloud storage where all my music, documents, pics, are uploaded. The only thing not backed up to OneDrive is my software folder which is like 27GB and my Videos library which is like 5TB

Real men don't use Windows System Restore. Be Brave...be like Phoenix

PS: Have you ever successfully restored anything with System Restore? It's just a piece of garbage that takes extra space / time when installing apps. Macrium Reflect images FTW

@Mr. Fox can you back me up bro?

 

I'm on a similar setup with OneDrive. I assume that you have probably created a separated Data Partition for OneDrive and moved your main User's Document / Pictures and Music folder to it, right?

Actually System Restore was enough to bring my system back from the ashes (See what I did there? ) quite a few times. I have some bad habits like jumping into newly released drivers and removing more than what I should with Wise Care and Autoruns. System Restore is pretty good at reverting this kind of thing without loosing one week of data.

Since you are here I have two questions related to your Macrium setup:

1. Why are you paying for Macrium 7? I may be wrong but by your post above it sounds like all that you ever do with Macrium is creating two full backup images. Is there any particular feature in the paid version that you need?
2. Also, are you using the Boot Menu option for recovery? If so, how do you access it? After running bcdedit /timeout 0 (in order to avoid the extra delay during regular boot) I'm not sure how to get the menu when I need it. Tried F8, F10, ESC, etc but couldn't get it. How do you actually boot into Macrium's recovery mode?

Kind regards,

 

I used the paid version (v7) because it has a new technology to speed up the backup / restoration process. My backup of a clean OS with no software takes 1 min to backup the OS drive and about 30 secs only to restore it.

I just add the Macrium Reflect environment to the boot menu but then set Windows to not display the boot menu upon startup, that way it boots straight to Windows 10. when I wanna restore, I simply click on the backup image, hit restore, select copy selected partitions, then Macrium Reflect reboots and enters the Macrium Reflect recovery environment since its built into Windows.

Should anything really bad happen that prevents me from even accessing Windows, I have created the Macrium Reflect Recovery USB Stick where I can boot off it and do the restoration.

 

Ah, brilliant, I didn't know that Macrium was smart engough to reboot in recovery mode by itself when we try to restore from their Windows application. Do you restore back to the clean OS state very often? (Just curious since this is something that I try to avoid)

 

Here is what I do:

1) Install Windows 10 Creators Update Bloatware Free Edition
2) Customize Windows to your liking, as in, I move my libraries (docs, pics, music, videos) to a folder in D: called Phoenix, in that folder, there is a OneDrive folder, that's where I actually put the libraries so they are automatically synced with OneDrive
3) Create the first image and name it Windows
4) install all drivers
5) install all software
6) configure all firewall rules to allow all your apps to have internet connectivity
7) run CCleaner
8) Create a 2nd image called ALL OK

When there are lots of driver/software updates, rather than uninstalling them, I like to start from a clean slate so I go back to image called Windows

So why create a 2nd image called ALL OK? let's say I wanna try some new app that messes up my system, I can go back to the perfect state within minutes

PS: For the base image, I turn off compression in Macrium Reflect to make it even faster. For the 2nd image, I keep compression level to medium